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Heating hives – questions - Beekeeping Portal
Joanna Baran: In Poland, you are one of the authorities on the subject of heating hives. Before we move on to the procedure itself and the details of the method, could you tell the readers a little about your beekeeping practice - how long have you had hives, do you have beekeeping traditions in your family?
Stefan Siudalski: I have been keeping bees since 1970, which is 55 years. During that time, I had several years' breaks in the times of rationing when the sugar and petrol allocation was not enough to service the apiary, and I had a traveling apiary of 80 hives.
In the countryside near Garwolin, where my family on my father's side comes from, practically every second house kept bees after the war. Regular Warsaw hives, peasant hives [i.e. single-walled but covered Warsaw hives] and sometimes even skep hives dominated.
1. How long have you been using the method of heating hives?
In the 1970s, I worked at the Institute of Physics of the Polish Academy of Sciences and at the same time kept bees. For many years I was the head of the design and production of scientific equipment there. Temperature measurements and stabilization in the strangest conditions were my daily bread. While running an apiary, I realized how important the temperature in the hives was. Combining knowledge from both fields allowed me to create well-functioning heaters with temperature stabilization for use in hives already in the early 1980s. The late Jerzy Tombacher, who used one of my sets in the early 1980 and I made several dozen of these sets, talks about them in his lecture on Beekeeping. That system from the late seventies was based on several assumptions:
• we turn on the heating after the bees have flown,
• 17-watt heaters on a flat aluminum radiator on the bottom of the hive,
• all hives are controlled by one and only in it is the temperature sensor placed on the radiator,
• all heaters are powered by a 220/24 V safety transformer,
• the heating power is controlled on the primary side of the safety transformer and here I used two solutions: 1. so-called zero-one, i.e. the heaters are either turned on at full power or turned off according to the thermoregulator indications, 2. smooth regulation, i.e. the power is supplied proportionally to the demand, of course with automatic regulation. I described both systems in the eighth issue of “Pszczelarstwo” in 8/1985. I assumed the following:
bee families in the apiary are more or less the same strength,
so the temperature measurement for stabilization can be done in one hive and all hives will receive heating according to the "standard" hive,
bees are able to regulate any excess or deficiency of heating themselves,
I decided that the power of the heaters at a level of about 17 W is sufficient,
I placed the heaters on aluminum sheet plates with a surface area of about an A5 sheet, in this way I obtained a kind of radiator that distributes heat evenly,
I placed the heating plates on the floor [bottom] of the hives - I inserted them through the outlet, so the wires protruded outside, which allowed for easy removal of the heaters and their control,
I decided that the voltage supplied to the heaters must be safe and I selected 24 V AC,
automatic heating regulation - smooth - [first tests were with step heating - see article from 1985] - was controlled with galvanic separation from the mains on the supply side of the transformer which was powered by mains voltage,
temperature measurement was based on a thermistor sensor placed on the heating plate and was set to switch off or limit heating at about 36 degrees Celsius
Today, after years of experience, I use a different, experience-enriched heating philosophy, which I will talk about later in the interview.
2. Why did you start introducing it in your apiary, how did you get to know it and what were the beginnings like, what turned out to be the most difficult?
At that time, I cooperated with the Institute of Apiculture in Puławy. The result of this cooperation was my system for measuring temperature using very thin thermocouples during wintering in several types of hives.
The publication on this subject is from 1987, but the measurements themselves were performed several years earlier.
The second "product" of this cooperation was another temperature stabilizer for which I even received an award.
3. What benefits do you see from heating hives?
I will start with something that is overlooked by beekeepers, namely providing bees with access to water in all weather conditions. When queens start to lay their eggs, their weekly water requirement reaches 3 liters per hive. Beekeeping manuals mention that bees bring water to the hives, but there is no information on how much water they need, and they need a lot.
What does it mean in practice if we provide them with constant access to water in the hives?
Three liters of water is 60 thousand flights of bees, and by giving them water to the hives, we save them that many flights per week. bees "exempt" from the obligation to carry water, can instead carry nectar. There is another very important aspect of ensuring that water is available in the hives and not outside by heating, namely - in the event of a weather breakdown when the queens have already brooded, the bees do not have to undertake the usually suicidal mission of flying for water outside the hive.
Those who do not heat their hives have often experienced such a situation in the spring when the weather broke and the bees flew outside in unfavorable conditions, creating a path of dead bees between the hives and the external waterer known to the bees.
4. Why do we heat? In what situations is it worth heating and how?
1. historically - a cluster placed next to the food, they are already at the ceiling, there are frosts and they will not go over to the food that is next to it - in the past, bricks or roof tiles were heated and placed on frames on which there was food to make them move not up but to the side. An old, well-known and effective method. If a heater is to be used for this purpose, it depends on its power, location and type:
- vertically by the food, on the edge - 10 W may be too low, 16-20 W is usually enough, but at outside temperatures below 10 degrees Celsius, 20-30 W is needed,
- horizontally on the top of the frames - usually 10 to 20 W is enough, but requires insulation from the top of the nest and these powers rather only provide the right water temperature,
- horizontally but on the bottom - 20 - 40 W - or even 60 W - depends on the type of hive and the material it is made of - it may accelerate the queen's brood - not always recommended, e.g. the beginning of January, in February, depends on the weather,
2. heating food when emergency feeding is necessary so that its temperature does not drop below about 10-12 degrees Celsius - here you can put a side heater even without stabilization with a power of about 15-20 W,
3. support weak colonies - colonies on two or three frames, usually heated, survive the winter and reach 20 frames in May and 35 frames in June - they are heated in autumn until frost and the heating is turned on in February, weak colonies can be heated all winter!
4. acceleration of development, thus increasing the brood area – heaters with a power of 20 W and above, optimally on the bottom if the heater is 40-60 W, switch on only when the thermometer in the nests indicates about >30°C /sometimes even at about 27°C - depends on the weather forecast/, it is necessary to provide a feeder with water - and then if the heater is about 20 W, then the water should be heated above all, i.e. vertical heaters without temperature regulation, constant resistance, can be used,
5. reduction of winter food consumption, reduction of winter sludge - many possible combinations, i.e. the heater can be on the bottom, between the bodies flat, on the side, but watch out for gradients and the possibility of local overheating, especially when the heaters are vertically positioned,
6. early drone rearing - for queen breeders, the appearance of drones is important, and in heated hives they appear a good three weeks earlier than in unheated ones.
7. acceleration of morning departures /flights/ and their extension in the evening - usually by about 1/2 - 3/4 hour compared to unheated ones. It is therefore obvious that they are more effective in pollinating plants, not to mention using other benefits.
8. extension of autumn brood - it is then necessary to perform fumigation, which can be carried out even at negative external temperatures, as long as the nest is above 27 degrees Celsius [optimally 30-34 degrees Celsius]
9. production of herbal honeys - significant extension of the season - even by two months,
10. protection against wasp robberies - very effective because on cold days bees in unheated ones protect the hive less well, while in heated ones, even at external temperatures of about 4-6 degrees Celsius when the wasps are still flying, the bees definitely cope with the wasps,
11. fight against varroa - as above, because? Because you can and even should fumigate at outside temperatures below zero - what counts is the temperature in the hive, not the outside.
12. Weather breakdowns in spring [see the example of Canada two years ago] or late autumn when temperatures drop below the bee's ZERO - and the queens have brooded - may be the reason - in brooding colonies - the need to eat larvae that are unable to warm up. Beekeepers do not see this and many are not even aware that such a phenomenon occurs. Heating hives using my method, i.e. self-regulating heaters, prevents this phenomenon even when temperatures drop to minus 20 degrees Celsius.
13. Flights in heated hives - without losses in bees take place above zero degrees Celsius.
14. You can safely set hives for honey impacts. What does it mean?
According to research conducted in the fifties in Poland, there are sometimes several days of a sudden burst of nectar, i.e. bees can bring about 8 kg of nectar in one day. Today, there are bursts of over 10 kg per day, but in order for the bees to manage these bursts, they must have space to lay the drop. For example - 10 kg of drop is at least 5 frames, and two, three such days, 10-15 frames must be empty at the time of the honey flow and such a capacity of the hive is safe only when the hive is heated. In practice, the reserve of empty space is about 10 frames.
But the flows can also occur when the temperatures at night drop below the bee's ZERO and without heating, keeping such an extensive honey room can cool the hive too much.
In heated hives, bees do not have to and do not sit on frames in the dark!
15. early commercial honey flows - those who heat are able to collect commercial amounts of honey from willows, maples or dandelions. There are early spring harvests reaching up to 20 kg from the hive and typically about 10-12 kg.
Note: we spin early honey without waiting for it to cap because it is very reluctant to cap and waiting with spinning ends with similar problems as with heather.
16. early nucleus colonies- from heated hives in the season, you can make up to 10 nucleus colonies and you can start making them a good three weeks earlier and the same number of weeks later in the autumn than in classic farming.
17. time savings on hive maintenance and spring inspections - in heated hives, bees can winter on even 20-25 frames [Wielkopolskie], which gives several significant benefits:
• you can and even should give them 30-35 kg of food for the winter,
• then there is no need for early spring checks to see if they have food or not - time savings,
• there is no need to increase the number of frames in the spring because this winter number of frames will be enough for the second honey harvest in the area - time savings,
• the number of cases of entering the swarming mood is noticeably reduced and it is visible!
18. feeding and processing of foundation - in heated ones - even on cold days - if they have a supply of food - you can feed twice as much foundation to process and it will not cool the nest.
19. lower bee aggression - bees are clearly less aggressive in heated hives and I have seen this many times when unheated ones were standing next to them.
20. honey profits - usually heated hives produce 2 to 4 times more honey in the same area as unheated ones - I had yields of up to 90 kg from a hive but it also depends on the weather. I usually collect 40 kg from a hive.
21. winter losses - it has never happened that a colony died having food on the side of the cluster. The declines of heated colonies are at a level of less than 1%, while the average for Mazovia is 15%.
22. symptoms of nosema disappear - I am not writing that heating cures nosema - I am writing that symptoms disappear and this is indicated by practically everyone who heats,
23. health of bee colonies - colonies heated in autumn introduce younger bees into winter, sometimes even by three generations, than those who feed according to textbooks until September 15.
5. What is the main problem with heating hives from your perspective?
There are several groups of problems, I will start with the need to completely change the approach to running a heated apiary in relation to the classic one. The fact that I managed to solve and practically apply the heating system is due to the fact that:
• I had unique, non-textbook knowledge of temperature measurement and stabilization,
• I knew that the hive environment is an exceptionally difficult environment to interfere with by means of heating,
• I correctly selected the heating power range and the place where the heaters should be placed,
• I realized that in order to be successful, you need to change your approach to running an apiary and give up the recommendations and terms that are written in the textbooks,
• you cannot sit "astride", i.e. use some methods according to the classics and some according to the new rules - the decision to heat is tantamount to the necessity to follow the recommendations and procedures that I wrote down and placed in the book "Modern apiary management, heating bee families",
• I also developed two methods that completely changed the approach to conducting hive inspections - 1. the method of checking the condition of bee families without looking into the hives, i.e. the TWA method, 2. the method of quick inspection of hives, i.e. 3xS - both methods save the energy of the bees and definitely reduce both the inspection time and the scope of intervention in the hives.
Method description – they support work in a heated apiary – they can be used in apiaries run classically
TWA method
Hive inspections can also be performed at night and in bad weather without looking into the hives using this method.
The TWA method is based on three activities
– T – reading the temperature from the “heart of the hive”
- W – i.e. “weighing” the hive using a manual method – we lift the hive slightly, once on one side, once on the other, by a few millimeters and assess whether the food is evenly distributed and whether its weight does not differ from the weight of other hives determined in this way
- A – we put our ear to the back wall of the hive and tap the hive. I assess the condition of the family by the way they respond. I described the method in 1984 in "Beekeeping". At that time, I associated five different acoustic reactions of bee families. Unfortunately, despite the passage of 40 years, no beekeeper has extended this method, and it is known that there are at least four other reactions or even no reactions, but I have not established their connections with the condition of the bee family. Described in 1984 in issue 9 on page 14 - the reactions occur most often. The graphs come from this article from 40 years ago.
3xS method
That is, we check only three frames - two outer frames and the middle one. We assess the food supplies on the outer frames and we don't even have to take the frames out, it is enough to lift them a few centimeters to assess the supplies by their "weight" and check whether brood has appeared on them, which is always a signal to immediately enlarge the nest. The middle frame gives us an assessment of the brood condition.
This system allows for a full review of the hive condition in about 3-5 minutes without unnecessary cooling.
Both methods described here allow you to save about 3-5 kg of honey in each hive.
6. How is your method received? In Poland and around the world?
Considering that my first publication was published 40 years ago, it is safe to say that the reception is zero, or to be precise, about 0.01%. So the logical question is – if this method is so effective, why is it not widely used? There are several reasons and I described them in my book – one of them is the resistance of the environment, ... those who praise heating will do it once and those who are against it attack constantly and in many places. In addition, the level of knowledge of beekeepers in Poland is low – I conducted surveys on FB in several groups related to beekeeping. It turned out that:
1. knowledge in different groups differs significantly,
2. there are areas of knowledge where the majority of surveyed beekeepers answered completely incorrectly, in addition:
• the beekeeping community is conservative and all changes were and are treated with distrust, even when someone in the community uses heating and has significant effects, it is met with disbelief and sometimes attempts are made to ridicule those who heat and not accept the positive results of heating,
• mistakes made over thirty years ago in institutes testing the usefulness of heating and the negative opinions they issued are causing pregnancy and today arousing distrust towards heating bees [see the film with J. Tombacher's statement],
• there is a poor flow of information to beekeepers in Poland from around the world about research on heating,
• only some apiaries have access to electricity,
• the Ministry of Agriculture and the media do not notice and do not want to notice the positive effects of heating hives,
• the topic of heating is discussed at webinars organized for beekeepers avoided and sometimes even ridiculed.
7. How does heating hives look like from the technical side - what do you use, when do you start heating, when do you stop, what are the effects?
The description of the criteria for deciding when to turn on the heating takes up three pages in my book.
Is it really that complicated?
No - we simply adjust the heating switch-on date depending on our expectations, the behavior of the bee families, the weather forecast for 45 days ahead, the honey flow pattern. The calendar is only a background to our actions - the factors mentioned here are more important.
In extreme cases, we heat the entire winter or with a short break, e.g. a month. This applies to weak families and nucleus colonies.
The date of turning off the heating depends primarily on the weather and honey flow in the area. The basic rule is to heat as long as there is a flow of pollen to the hives. This ensures good nutrition for the young bees, thanks to which the winter litter is about half a glass of bees. These extended periods of heating bee colonies allow for fumigation at times when there is the least brood in the hives.
8. What devices do you use? What heaters would you recommend?
After many tests, experiments, observations of climate change and sowing, I introduced several important corrections to the initial version of heating:
• I do not wait for a flight to turn on the heating,
• As a result, the power of the heaters increased from 17 W to 40-60 W and even more for dadants and extended Warsaw hives,
• Instead of thermoregulators, I used appropriately selected self-regulating heating cables placed similarly to the first versions on the bottom,
• I introduced the need to use one thermometer per hive with a movable probe placed in the "heart of the hive" because some decisions have to be made based on the thermometer readings,
• the heaters are powered directly from the 230 V mains without thermoregulators [the cables are grounded in the power plug],
• I developed instructions and procedures for operating heated hives. The types of heaters, parameters and their selection for a specific hive are described together with contacts to places where they can be ordered, can be found on the website http://pszczoly.siudalski.pl/czym-grza--.html
9. What does heating hives look like from the economic side - heaters, electricity, sensors needed to monitor the condition of the hive - how much does it cost and does it pay off in honey sales?
1. The monthly cost of heating one hive - calculated at a price for 1 kWh of PLN 1.1 - is in the range of PLN 8-15. So if we turn on the heating, e.g. on March 1 and heat until the end of September, it will cost no more than PLN 100 in total. This is the equivalent of two or three jars of honey when the minimum increase in efficiency in heated ones is 10 additional jars, i.e. the minimum profit is 7x50 PLN = 350 PLN net from the hive, counting only electricity costs. In my case - the net profit from one hive is usually at the level of >1 thousand PLN. 2. The cost of the heater is from 70 /if we bind the cables ourselves/ to 140 PLN per hive if we buy ready-made cables - I recommend buying ready-made ones - if someone does not have the experience, they may have problems with self-assembly because the connections are clamped and not soldered, plus heat shrink sleeves, clamp connections, network cable are needed specifically for this type of cable. 3. It is necessary to install one thermometer in each hive and they cost from 4 to about 15 PLN - they require changing the batteries about every 2 years, which is a negligible cost,
4. It is very often necessary to provide pollen in early spring and I will not give the costs here because they will be different every year,
5. It is necessary to ensure that you have a supply of no less than 30 frames for each hive and an appropriate number of bodies for them - I will explain why this is so later in the study,
6. It is necessary to feed much more in the winter, even up to 35 kg of food per hive and this is an additional expense of about 50-70 PLN per hive, I winter bees on 13-18-23 frames in the Wielkopolskie Voivodeship,
7. What is good for bees is even better, unfortunately for varroa, which is why delaying treatments or skipping them is very dangerous - the benefit, however, is what I mentioned several times in this study, that you can safely perform treatments both at least a month earlier and a month or even two later in in heated hives compared to unheated ones, it also gives the possibility of much more effective combating of varroa than in the classical economy,
8. The need for weekly spring checks of the water level in feeders - although usually for the first two or three weeks after switching on the heating it is enough to check once every 14-20 days.
However, it must be remembered - heaters and thermometers will serve for about 10 years, so we do not count their full purchase value in the costs.
10. For which apiaries would you recommend heating - for small ones, or maybe only for commercial ones?
Every type of apiary will benefit from heating - even migratory apiaries because they can be prepared before being transported so that they have solid strength.
11. How do you currently perceive the honey market in Poland and Europe - beekeepers are rather pessimistic. In your opinion, is there a chance for a positive turn of events?
A positive turn for beekeepers or consumers? If in Spain I buy heather [Brezo] honey for about 9 Euro and in Poland 16 Euro and in Spain an hour of work of a beekeeper's assistant is 17 Euro and in Poland 10-12 Euro and fuel costs are similar, how can we explain the price of honey in Poland?
In Poland, the efficiency of a hive is 15-18 kg and how can we compete with such efficiency in Europe? In addition, winter losses in our country are at the level of 15% of hives, so how can we make profits here?
Heating means zero colonies lost during wintering, which with 15-20% winter losses in Poland is already a success in itself - assuming the value of a bee colony in early spring at no less than PLN 700, let's calculate how it is on a national scale - there are about 1.8 million bee colonies in Poland - let's assume that winter caused the smallest losses in history, i.e. only 10% of bee colonies died, i.e. 180 thousand colonies at PLN 700 each. This gives a loss value of PLN 226 million. So is it worth getting interested in heating? Shouldn't the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development, for example, be interested in this method?"...
12. Do you have any advice for beekeepers who would like to start heating their hives?
"He who doesn't risk, doesn't drink champagne" I don't recommend experimenting on your own - use proven sources of information and advice. You can get basic information on FB in the group "Heating bee families" or full knowledge by buying my book "Modern apiary economy - heating bee families" in which there are active links to about 90 of my films on YT.
Additional information apart from the questions asked
Explanation of the terms used:
- the heart of the hive, i.e. the center of the frames or opposite the entrance, at a height of 1/3 from the ceiling and 1/3 of the distance from the hive wall,
- bee ZERO - i.e. about plus 10 degrees Celsius.
Joanna Baran
https://www.portalpszczelarski.pl/artykul/2961-stefan-siudalski-wywiad-z-pszczelarzem
This book is sold as PDF.
For today The book is only in Polish.
The book can be purchased by writing to the siudalski@wp.pl
